Big Oil's Tree Huggers

Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairsby Tony Cartalucci

It's not entirely accurate to call the Belfer Center merely a big oil representative that forms the spearhead of promoting the theory of anthropogenic global warming and the resulting Ponzi-scheme environmental policies proposed to deal with it. They also meddle deeply in the affairs of foreign nations, have banking magnates lining their advisory board, as well as lobbyists like Belfer adviser Robert Blackwill of Barbour Griffith & Rogers salvaging the failed efforts of a US-backed now exiled Thai prime minister.

Belfer Center is a mixed bag of self-serving corporate agendas. As an international think-tank located within one of America's most "prestigious" universities, it turns out to be nothing more than a den of deception and intellectual dishonesty, as we'll see as we peel back the cheap veneer of legitimacy.

Named after Robert Belfer of the Belco Petroleum Corporation and later, director of the failed Enron Corporation, the Belfer Center describes itself as being "the hub of the Harvard Kennedy School's research, teaching, and training in international security affairs, environmental and resource issues, and science and technology policy." Robert Belfer still sits in as an International Council Member, begging one to wonder what sort of "research" is going on within the halls of a center named after a man synonymous with big oil and big fraud.

Belfer's director, Graham Allisonis also an astounding example of self-serving American corporatism steering US policy. He was a founder of the Trilateral Commission, a director of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a consultant to the RAND Corporation, Director of the Getty Oil Company, Natixis, Loomis Sayles, Hansberger, Taubman Centers, Inc., and Belco Oil and Gas, as well as a member of the advisory boards of Chase Bank, Chemical Bank, Hydro-Quebec, and the shady International Energy Corporation, all according to his official Belfer Center bio.

Other questionable characters befouling the halls of this nefarious nexus include Belfer alumnus, Goldman Sachs creature, free-trade pusher, CFR member, and now World Bank president Robert Zoellick. Sitting on the board of directors is CFR member and former Goldman Sachs consultant, Ashton Carter. There is also former director of Citigroup and Raytheon, former Director of Central Intelligence and CFR member John Deutch, who required a pardon by US President Bill Clinton to avoid prosecution over a breach of security while fumbling his duties at the CIA. Meanwhile, Nathaniel Rothschild of Atticus Capital and RIT Capital Partners, Paul Volcker of the Federal Reserve, and former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff all serve as Belfer Center's "advisers."

Last but not least, there is John P. Holdren, also a Council on Foreign Relations member, science adviser to both President Clinton and current US President Barack Obama, and co-author with Paul Ehrilich of the now notorious "Ecoscience." When Holdren isn't brand-building for "Climate Disruption," he is dreaming of a Malthusian fueled totalitarian global government that forcibly sterilizes the world's population. He feared, erroneously as all Malthusians have done throughout history, that overpopulation would be the end of humanity. He claimed in his hubris filled, fact deficient book, "The No Growth Society," that by the year 2040, the United States would have a dangerously unsustainable population of 280 million he called "much too many." The current US population is over 300 million, and despite shockingly incompetent leadership, it is still sustainable.

Considering this, and that Holdren's fellow board members leading this center of "research" are nothing more than a collection of career bureaucrats, bankers, oilmen, suspected criminals and fraudsters, he himself then comes across as difficult to take seriously.

These have been the halls within which America's "climate policy" has been refined, documented and presented during the various public relations stunts in Kyoto, Copenhagen, Cancun, and throughout the legislatures of the United States. It is quite obvious that the combination of Holdren's quackery and the involvement of the most parasitic and corrupt corporations on Earth are doing nothing but exploiting people's genuine concerns for the environment.

We should come to expect as much from our government and our universities as big money's tentacles wrap themselves around our nation's institutions and bend them to their own self-serving will. Through Belfer's halls pass not only the subpar leaders of America today, but also the subpar leaders of America's tomorrow.

Belfer runs a fellowship program churning out throngs of America's next Robert Zoellick's, Fareed Zakaria's, and Philip Zelikow's, ensuring the continuation of their agenda well into the future. That is of course, unless we strip them of their self-proclaimed legitimacy, publicly expose the conflict of interests undermining their prestigious mandate, and make it once again shameful to be a villain in America. Harvard's Belfer Center should be as synonymous with fraud as the Enron scandal the Belfer Center's namesake helped preside over in 2001.